He wouldn’t thank me for saying so, but George Pitcher, the Telegraph‘s religious affairs editor, is one of the most respected writers in Fleet Street (where, as it happens, he is also a priest at St Bride’s). So people should take note when he says the following, in the wake of “bigotgate”:
I’ve stood in a church vestry as a bloke has called a mild-mannered congregant he’s just spoken to a “prat”, though it may have been the ruder word that rhymes with that. On another occasion, a man I was with defaced the application page of a colleague in the membership book of a gentleman’s club with some very choice rude words. Nothing exceptional in either instance I suppose. Except both of these people are currently on the front bench of the Conservative Party.
One could argue that these were private circumstances and they weren’t silly enough to wear microphones. But if Conservative Central Office would like to tell me it’s all untrue, then I’ll be happy to act as both men’s microphone myself, though of course I’m assuming they’re both penitent sinners, like Brown . . .
Funnily enough, this morning I spoke to another senior commentator, again on the right, who made this point: How many of us have never shut the door on a dinner guest and said, ‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ having been pleasant all evening? How many of us have never hung up a phone after an apparently pleasant conversation and said a rude word?
It does appear that the opinions of those with independence of thought — including the unreported 50 per cent who told a poll for the Murdoch-owned Sun that yesterday’s incident was a “storm in a teacup” — are rather more varied than those of the right-wing press.
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